I recently attended a presentation by author, Sue Harrison, where she talked about her journey to becoming a writer. She genuinely seems like a delightful person, and her personal story was an uplifting one. But when she mentioned that she has difficulty remembering faces–to the extent that the first draft of one of her books had virtually no facial descriptions of the characters–I realized I knew the technical term for that. Which brings us to today’s word.
prosopagnosia, noun – face blindness
Learned from: Rogue Legacy (Playstation 4, Mac, mobile, Nintendo Switch, PC, Playstation 3, XBox One)
Developed by Cellar Door Games
Published by Cellar Door Games (2013)
Rogue Legacy is, as the title might suggest, a roguelike platformer. The gimmick in this one is that when your character dies, he or she is replaced by an heir you select from a few possible options. Some of the options are pretty straightforward, like the character’s class, but the cool part is that each one has a selection from a vast variety of traits they can be born with. From the innocuous (being bald), to the mildly inconvenient (colorblindness), to things like prosopagnosia, which made it so you couldn’t see any of the traits of the next generation. Not horrible, compared to something like schizophrenia (which I think showed enemies and platforms that aren’t there, while sometimes not showing ones that are), but it meant you’d have no idea what to expect on the next run.
And really, that’s what kept Rogue Legacy fun. The actual platforming and combat isn’t bad, but without the quirky results of genetic chance, the repetitive runs probably would have gotten boring before the end. It’s still a fun little game, easily worth the $15 it’ll set you back on most platforms.
Go, my balding, vampiric dwarf with ADHD! You are the hero we deserve!
You might be expecting me to be talking about a horror game today, with a title like that, but nope. Bit of a story behind what brought this word to mind:
So, my wife and I went to see the fireworks downtown last week. Our city is situated on a lake, so we went down to the lower harbor and found a spot to sit right by the water while we waited for it to get dark. At one point, I took them off to rub my eyes or something, and they just slipped out of my fingers, skidded across the concrete embankment, and disappeared 20+ feet underwater. I’ve been using a pair of cheaters since then (though a holiday weekend and several hundred dollars later, I do have a new pair of actual glasses ordered), but walking around with them on feels like I’m inside a fishbowl. That means, when I’m at home or work and I need to move around, I’ve relied a lot on remembering where stuff is. And in a roundabout way, that brings us to today’s word.
homing, adj. – finding one’s way to a target or location through memory or technology
Learned from: Raiden (arcade, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, Turbographx-16, PC, Atari Lynx, mobile)
Developed by Seibu Kaihatsu
Published by Tecmo (1990)
Raiden, to me, is the quintessential vertical-scrolling shmup. Other games are flashier, or have deeper mechanics, or fill the screen with more bullets, but there’s something about Raiden that keeps me coming back even after all these years. The sprite work is solid, the levels all look distinct, and there’s just something to the overall gameplay that simply feels right.
I don’t even remember if there’s much of a story, but sometimes all you need is to hop into the cockpit of a red or blue jet, decide if you want lasers or a spread of bullets, dumb-fire missiles or homing ones, and mow down wave after wave of enemy tanks and planes. Raiden is an emblematic arcade experience: difficult but fun, simple but addictive; it’s one of my favorite arcade games of all time, and one of these days I’ll beat it on a single quarter.
I don’t even need my glasses to see this is a Crystal Castles arcade cabinet with the Raiden logo slapped on the side. Bizarre.
Pixel graphics! ’80s references across all of popular media! The stock market crashing! Retro is in, baby, and it’s only a matter of time before 3D glasses make a comeback in movie theaters again…assuming theaters survive the streaming wars. But hey, paying way too much to go see a movie in dirty room full of loud people is totally retro too, so maybe there’s hope! Anyway, this all does lead us to today’s word.
anaglyph, noun – an image printed in two different colors overlayed across each other, to give the illusion of being in three dimensions when viewed through special glasses
Learned from: Balatro (PC, Mac, mobile, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Nintendo Switch, XBox One, XBox Series X/S)
Developed by LocalThunk
Published by Playstack (2024)
Balatro, if you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, or you’re reading this in the future, is a deconstruction of the roguelike deckbuilding genre, where there are no monsters, no dungeons, no trips across the stars–just poker. Your cards are literal playing cards that can be modified in various ways to give more points, generate more money, trigger multiple times, generate other cards, etc. It’s a game that you really have to play to understand its appeal, but it’s simple, addictive, and worth every penny.
As you play and learn winning combos, Balatro offers you ways to up the challenge, from decks that are missing cards, to higher stakes runs that impose restrictions on what you can do. But the further you go, the more you unlock, and beating the game on the “black chip” difficulty unlocks the Anaglyph Deck, which gives you a free double tag whenever you beat the boss blind at the end of an ante. That probably doesn’t mean much if you haven’t played it, but it can be a useful bonus. If you’re lucky.
Once upon a time, these were the coolest thing. I swear.
Ages ago, comedian and then-anchor at The Daily Show, Lewis Black, came to the town where I’d been going to college in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to do a stand-up show. My friends and I managed to get tickets for some of the last seats still available, way in the back of the auditorium, but I’m glad we went, because the way he kicked off the show still sticks with me. Not verbatim, but close enough:
“I don’t know if anyone’s told you people, but it’s April! There’s supposed to be birds singing, and flowers blooming, and fucking grass! But I look around here, and everything’s white, and gray, and dead–I want to slit my wrists, just so I can see some color!”
Welcome to da U.P., eh? Which brings us to today’s word.
isochoric, adj. – performed, maintained, or existing under a constant volume
Learned from: The Bazaar (PC, Mac, mobile [soon, as of this writing])
Developed by Tempo
Published by Tempo (2025)
The Bazaar is an interesting mix of Slay the Spire, Backpack Hero, and Team Fight Tactics, that has been devouring my free time since the open beta dropped a few months ago. It’s in full release now, and it’s still free to play if you want to check it out. There are some cosmetic purchases, and some cards you can buy–but those cards will become available for free at the end of their respective seasons, if you don’t mind waiting.
Anyway, you play as one of several heroes (though only Vanessa is available to start; you have to unlock the rest), making their way through the dangerous streets of the titular Bazaar. Vanessa is a pirate, Pygmalien is kinda-sorta a buff orc, Mak is an immortal alchemist, and my personal favorite, Dooley, is a little spherical robot pyromaniac. It’s one of his cards, the Isochoric Freezer, that taught me today’s word, a small item which freezes one of your opponent’s items for a time.
The Bazaar is PvP, but there’s no direct interaction between you and your opponents; if you’re like me, and steer away from multiplayer games in general due to toxic communities, then rest easy. So, you start out with nothing, and get to pick from one or two starting items to begin the match. These might be enchanted cards, or skills, or just extra money (I think; I never pick this option), which usually form the basis of your strategy. Pick a toxic blowfish for Vanessa’s first item, and you’re probably going to go for a poison build; pick the hamster wheel core for Dooley, and you’re probably going to focus on friend cards; etc. There are a ton of different approaches you can take, and since you start from zero each time, it’s fun to experiment.
Rounds are broken up into days, and days into six hours each. You’ll typically get four hours each day to acquire cards, have random events, buy skills and consumables, etc. Midway through the day, you’ll fight a non-player monster, to get XP and usually an item/skill if you win, and at the end of the day you’ll go up against another player, with their own deck layout. The cards in each of your decks activate automatically on cooldowns, so it’s all on you to arrange them in the most efficient way, and hope it’s enough to win. Sure, the RNG can screw you over sometimes, if your opponent has gotten better cards than you, but there’s still a lot of strategizing involved. Ideally, you fight until you’ve beaten 10 other players, but chances are, you’ll lose enough times that you’ll be out of the match before then. Still, it’s a ton of fun, whether you’re playing casual or ranked (ranked earns you chests if you do well enough, which contain cosmetic items and gems you can spend to unlock other heroes and things like that).
I know I’ve rambled a bit here, but The Bazaar really is a blast, and certainly worth checking out for the price point of free.
Guess the month! If you said anything but June, July, or August, you might be right!
I love it when foreign words officially enter the English dictionary. It shows that language is a fluid, ever-evolving thing, and considering today’s word was added to the Oxford English Dictionary as recently as 2021, it shows that, barring an Idiocracy-style collapse of civilization, that’s not likely to stop anytime soon…even if the probability of that collapse seems to be increasing every year. Anyway, onto today’s word.
mukbang, noun – a livestreamed video wherein the host eats a large quantity of food and chats with viewers
Learned from: Goddess of Victory: Nikke (PC, mobile)
Developed by Shift Up
Published by Level Infinite (2022)
Contrary to some of the other gacha games I’ve featured on here, Nikke is much more par for the course for the genre: You form a team of whatever scantily-clad anime girls the random number generator deems fit to give you, and then set off on a quest to save the world. Though, Nikke does do a few things that help it stand out.
First, the setting is post-apocalyptic instead of fantasy which, while not unique, is a nice change. Second, the gameplay is actually pretty enjoyable; it’s essentially a rail shooter, where your team of girls blasts away at evil robots using various types of guns with their own strengths and weaknesses, occasionally triggering special abilities, and whatnot. And if you get tired of that, there’s always something else to do: Play a tower defense minigame, or try a surprisingly competent Vampire Survivors clone, or a vertical-scrolling shmup (as in the recent Evangelion crossover event). And lastly, there’s the characters, themselves.
Even when you’re not getting familiar faces as guest stars in the crossover events, the girls you can recruit are generally fun and quirky. There’s the “core” group that moves the story along: Rapi, Anis, and Neon, a straight-laced soldier, a jaded tomboy, and an adorkable self-proclaimed spy, respectively. But the side characters can be a lot of fun, too. There’s Drake, the far-too-nice one who wants to be a supervillain; Ether, the mad scientist who just might actually be a supervillain; the gamer trio of Exia, Elegg, and Trony; and Belorta, the foodie who’s fond of playing pranks on people. And more, of course, but it’s Belorta that gives us today’s word.
Your troops will chat with you sometimes, and in one text message I got from Belorta, she tried to set up a mukbang with my character and her friend, Mica. At the time, I thought it was more of an eating competition, but it turns out mukbangs were (and possibly still are?) bizarrely popular spectator events in South Korea. Who knew?
I’m not sure I had a choice in the matter. Art by Amagasa Nadame.
Lately, I’ve been on something of a side-quest in life, to better understand trends that don’t make sense to me: the enduring popularity of isekai light novels; the appeal of free-to-play gacha games; why the majority of the country would vote to re-elect a convicted felon who doesn’t care about anything but his own material wealth. It’s the middle one of those three things that brings us to today’s word.
mancozeb, noun – an organometallic fungicide humans apply on plants
Learned from: Reverse: 1999 (PC, mobile)
Developed by Bluepoch
Published by Bluepoch (2023)
Apologies for the weird phrasing in the definition, but as you can see from the screenshot below, that is the verbatim definition the game, itself, gives the player. One of the characters ends up getting poisoned after a fight, and another member of the party who specializes in potions, starts rattling off a list of ingredients she’ll need to try and heal him–to which he replies that he’d probably be better off with some mancozeb. It’s worth noting that the poisoned character in question is a floating apple wearing a shirt collar and tie…Reverse:1999 is a weird game.
I’m only in Act II so far, so I don’t know how this all shapes up. The story so far though, involves an event called the Storm that happened right at the end of 1999, causing time to lurch backwards, and erasing anyone caught in the incident. But now other Storms are hitting other points in history, particularly around times of social turmoil: the civil rights movement of the ’60s, the stock market crash that kicked off the great depression in 1929, etc. In the midst of all this are various factions of arcanists–people (and other things) with magical abilities–fighting for their own ends, or just to survive. And since this is a gacha game, you’ll end up with a team of characters from across large swathes of history, from Victorian necromancers; to futuristic space rangers; to quasi-historical figures like proclaimed time traveler, John Titor; to possessed radios; to the metaphysical manifestation of rabies; to a floating sentient apple. It’s a bizarre, wild setup, and while it doesn’t always make the most sense (not helped by the occasionally spotty translation), it’s actually one of the best games I’ve played in this genre.
A lot of it has to do with the gameplay–it’s the only gacha I’ve stumbled across that uses a turn-based card battle system, similar to Slay the Spire, and that sort of thing is just my jam. Plus, the art is gorgeous, opting for a more painted look than your standard cel-shaded anime style, which really sets it apart. And so far at least, there’s surprisingly little fanservice; I don’t mind that sort of thing by any means, but I do feel that its absence here is noteworthy. Especially since Reverse: 1999 manages to stand on its own without using T&A as a crutch. It’s a game that deserves more recognition, so if you’re intrigued by the concept and don’t mind being a little confused along the way, it’s well-worth checking out. And it’s not like they paid me to say any of this; I’ve just really been enjoying my time with this one so far.
Sonetto, in the center here, is one of the main characters. In any other gacha, she’s probably have at least two more cup sizes, and two fewer layers of clothing.
We are certainly living through interesting times–in the Chinese curse sense of the term–here in the US. It’s barely been a week into the new administration, and from one day to the next, you can pick a random group of people, and there’s a good chance that the status of their employment, healthcare, liberty, etc. will be anything but certain. Entire swathes of our society are already being reworked, and by this time next year, our cars are probably going to be running on coal, and doctors are going to be relegated to diagnosing illnesses as imbalances of the four humours. Which brings us to today’s word.
splenetic, adj. – spiteful, ill-tempered, or melancholic
Learned from: Astrologaster (PC, Mac, mobile, Nintendo Switch)
Developed by Nyamyam
Published by Nyamyam (2019)
Astrologaster is an odd little adventure game, where you play as a freelance physician in Elizabethan England, who believes that superior medical treatment can be provided by consulting the stars. You go through the story meeting various (sometimes famous and powerful) clients, listening to their complaints and symptoms, and after consulting your star charts, offering what astrology claims is the proper diagnosis and cure, like prescribing cherries to a particularly splenetic individual…or warning them away from cherries; I don’t exactly remember what the stars said, but I remember cherries were involved in the consultation.
Along the way, you can lie and try to screw over clients you don’t like, have love affairs, dodge draconian regulations, try to get rich by nefarious means, and more. Your character isn’t a particularly good person, as you come to learn over time (spoilers), and my main gripe with the game is that you have very little say in this. As far as I can tell, certain events play out regardless of what you do, and whether you’d want your character to act in certain ways or not. Still, it’s an interesting, and quite different narrative adventure game, and worth a look if you can find it on sale.
If nothing else, it’s funny to diagnose someone with the plague, and tell them their only hope lies in daily enemas of honey and prune juice or whatever.
When I first began writing this blog, I hadn’t really intended to ever really get political; I just wanted to have a nice little corner of the Internet, where I could educate people a little bit, and ideally make them laugh in the process. But those are both things which seem anathema to the incoming administration, given their version of humor is coldhearted and cruel, and they’re planning on dismantling the Department of Education, and probably replacing it with a system where the only correct answer on any given test question is “Jesus.” If they aren’t already, education and entertainment will soon be inherently political acts by default. Which, in a roundabout way, brings us to today’s word.
theotropic, adj. – tending towards religion
Learned from: Snowbreak: Containment Zone (PC, mobile)
Developed by Seasun Games PTE. LTD.
Published by Seasun Games PTE. LTD. (2023)
For a time, my curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to try out a few gacha games, to see what all the hype was about. Sadly, none of them held my interest for more than a week. Snowbreak seemed like it might be an exception at first, with gameplay that was more a third-person shooter than an action beat ’em up, but the shine wore off pretty quickly–the fact that character voices would randomly change languages, with no way to set them back, certainly didn’t help.
The story is a convoluted sci-fi yarn centering around Titans that have been wreaking havoc on humanity, and the handful of superpowered sexy ladies (because, of course) who are fighting against them. Your character gets wrapped up in all this after being exposed to a toxic substance called Titagen (I think), which instead of killing him, alters his brain chemistry and growing theotropic nerves in his grey matter that…you know, I don’t even know. The whole thing ends up being a justification to have your sexy female operatives run around disappointingly tiny environments, shooting cannon fodder enemies, and fighting the occasional bullet-spongy boss.
If the levels weren’t so small, or there was more to do between lengthy infodumps and spinning for loot boxes, I might’ve given Snowbreak more of a chance. Alas, it didn’t do anything to make itself more compelling than the other games I tried in this genre, so I’ll never know if all the terms appropriated from Norse mythology ever solidify into a coherent plot.
But hey, at least it’s free. If your backlog is smaller than mine, you might find this one more worthwhile.
I really need to stop drifting away from this blog every so often. But, since this is the season associated with things coming back from the dead, I thought this was as good a time as any to get back to it. Happy Halloween, everyone!
This is a strange name for a strange skill. I think only one type of enemy in the entire game uses it against you, and then only in tandem with another specific type of enemy. Necrolatry reverses how healing and damage work, on whichever character it targets, so healing skills hurt them, and attacks heal them. At first, this may seem rather pointless, until you realize the cleric-type enemies have no problem targeting your party with their healing skills, but it’s pretty hard for you to do damage to your own people, or try to cast healing on the enemy. It’s a neat trick–most certainly not a treat–and one I don’t think I’ve seen used in another RPG since.
Even KOS-MOS agrees that the fact that this series hasn’t gotten a remaster is the cruelest trick of all.
My wife and I are members at the local food co-op, largely because you never quite know what you’re going to find there. From locally-grown produce, to fair trade baskets from Africa, to Buddha’s Hand citrus fruits from…I don’t remember where. Anyway, walking through there is always an experience. Every so often though, you don’t even have to head there to get a little taste of the unexpected. Case in point, they’re having a “Cheese Madness” event right now, with samples and brackets where their top cheeses face off against one another, until only one is left, voted in as the ultimate cheese. I’m not sure why they chose cheese for their March Madness parody, but it does bring us to today’s word.
rennet, noun – an enzyme used in the making of cheese
Learned from: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (Playstation 4, mobile, PC, XBox One)
Developed by ArtPlay
Published by 505 Games, Netease (2019)
Bloodstained is Castlevania in everything but name–even to the point where it was produced by Koji Igurashi, one of the heavy-hitters behind the later Castlevania games. It’s got the atmosphere, the complex maps, the varied combat, but it also includes some subsystems that were absent from most if its inspiration: namely, crafting.
Gather up the right materials, and you can create things you’d expect, like new weapons and armor, but you can also cook food to use for healing and permanent stat boosts. If you’re particularly masochistic, you can try to recreate an increasingly complicated and vague series of recipes for an old lady who can barely remember her own name, let alone the food she used to enjoy. So she’ll say she wants to taste the “portable snack” she used to love, or something “fluffy,” or something as obtuse as a “novel idea.” She rewards you if you get it right, but some of the recipes in Bloodstained are a pain to put together. Some are simple, like using wheat to make dough, to make noodles. But say you want to make a pizza…well, you need that wheat to make the dough, but you also need tomatoes, whatever the toppings are, and milk and rennet to make cheese. But you can’t just have all the base ingredients in your possession; no, that would be too easy. Unless they’ve patched it out, you needed to make every intermediate component by hand, before you could get to the final product. The rewards were usually worth it, but getting there was an uphill battle sometimes.
Brain Rot 